on July 17, 1963, Jack Nilles sat in the Pentagon hallways for hours, drinking cup after cup of sloppy coffee while waiting for a meeting that would never happen. Nilles, a missile scientist for the United States Air Force, had raced from his home in Los Angeles to Washington DC after being summoned at short notice the day before to give a briefing on the design of new reconnaissance satellites. As he sat there, he found himself pondering aimlessly what millions of servants have been thinking ever since: I could have been more productive working from home.
“I had to get on this damn plane, waste a night and a day in a meeting with nothing — and then come back,” says Nilles, now 89. The general commander of the Aerospace Corporation used CCTV to connect to the Pentagon, but Nilles did not have that luxury. So he decided to do something about it.
“Normally people in LA would drive to work to an office somewhere downtown, but what if employees don’t have to get in their cars to get to work?” Nilles asked. “I had helped NASA put man on the moon, so why couldn’t I do anything about LA’s terrible traffic problem? I thought: working from home can replace commuting.” And so he began the world’s first large-scale experiment in hybrid works.
Nilles called the concept “part-time telecommuting,” which mixed remote working days with office days. Thanks to the pandemic, millions of current workers were given a crash course in the type of work they were trying to do – according to the Office for National Statistics, nearly 30 percent of workers in the UK were doing some kind of telecommuting in 2020 alone, compared to 12.4 percent in 2019 , but as restrictions ease, we’re navigating a practice that Nilles and his contemporaries spearheaded in the early 1970s. After almost half a century, their concept is becoming mainstream. A study by Future Forum, Slack’s research consortium, found that by November 2021, the number of global knowledge workers in a hybrid arrangement had grown to 56 percent, up from 46 percent in May 2021.
Giving people more choice about where they work has always unsettled great business leaders. When Nilles first suggested research into hybrid work, his bosses at The Aerospace Corporation said, “‘Forget it — we’re engineers, we’re metal benders, we don’t deal with sensitive, sensitive things,'” he recalls. Not to be afraid, he told a former colleague at the University of Southern California about his idea and was offered a job as director in interdisciplinary program development at USC, coordinating a team of academics from various disciplines to investigate his hybrid work concept. “Nobody knew what it meant, which was good, because I could do whatever I wanted,” he laughs.
In 1973, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, Nilles assembled a team of scientists from multiple disciplines to test whether part-time telecommuting would be effective in a real business organization, and see what impact it had on productivity and energy. The staff of the participating national insurance company worked from home a few days a week on the telephone and for several days went by bus, bicycle or on foot to a specially set up satellite office. Their work was fed into a minicomputer at the end of the day and all data was transferred to the mainframe computer in the center at night.
